1721

in talking to someone who commutes every day, i’m going to get a case

my kindle should be here in two days. i’m looking forward to finally being able to read some Dumas without feeling like my wrist is going to explode.

1722

I’m going to be trapped on a flight to New York for the Comic Con (from LAX) and back again, so I made the ultimate mistake of walking through Target with enough cash to buy a Kindle with me. Order on line? Easy to resist. You gotta wait, and check the door or make a pilgrimage to the carrier to pick it up from them…but have it right there in front of you and you can take it home immediately, well, that was too much temptation!

Since it fits into my cargo pocket, I probably should get a protective case. Nothing fancy, just something that protects the screen. Recommendations?

1723

Best Buy is carrying them now too.

— Alan

1724

I think they are the same, same techonology, at least. Look at youtube videos.

1725

DX2 is supposed to have the same e-ink pearl as the K3. I see a difference, it’s just not astounding. Amazon has claimed “50% better contrast” for DX => DX2 and for K2 => K3.

1726

Kindle for the Web announced (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000579091).

— Alan

1727

I already used this today without even knowing it existed. I went to read a sample chapter and it opened in a browser instead of my Kindle for PC app.

1728

Kindle for the Web is for sample content only right now, in case anyone gets their hopes up that they can browse/read their own libraries or whatnot. Personally I can’t see myself reading my books in a browser anyway, but I still wonder if Amazon plans to expand the web app for full book reading.

1729

this may seem like a bit of a weird question, but in anticipation of getting my kindle tomorrow, i’ve been loading up on some public domain stuff from Gutenberg. How will I get that from my laptop to the kindle when it arrives? Does it just drag and drop with a USB or something else?

1730

Yes, when you plug in the kindle it shows up as a disk.

1731

You can do it just with Windows Explorer drag ‘n’ drop, but I highly recommend using Calibre. It’ll import all your files into an iTunes-style library, and then can sync them up to the Kindle. It’s especially handy if you have files in other formats (ePub, MS Reader, even HTML) because it’ll convert them into MOBI as it syncs, if you want.

1732

Kindle 3 (Wireless) arrived yesterday. I will speak from the point of view of a Kindle Noob.

It’s a sleek package and if you order it from Amazon is already registered to you. The e-ink display is mostly awesome–at first I didn’t even know the display was on when I took it out of the packaging. It has a plastic cover sheet on the top and I thought the “what to do next” text was printed on that, but instead it was actually on the display. It’s on all the time, and it looks crisp. I wish it would rotate but that’s about it. It’s cool anyway.

Hooks into the home wireless connection, great. The exact procedure for moving PDFs and other files over is not exactly clear, nor is the difference between using @kindle.com and @free.kindle.com email addresses. And, if you’re using PDFs from straight docs or HTML files, the Kindle works fine (far as I can tell). If you’re reading scans, even get ones, the Kindle is not so great. And it seriously chokes on anything graphics heavy. I already had to learn how to hard-restart after it hung up. I also wish I could arrange collections via file directory rather than doing it through the Kindle interface.

I also unfortunately attempt to zoom in and move the screen around by touching the screen. Am too damn used to the iPhone now. This will make transitioning hard and makes me wonder if a next-gen iPad wouldn’t just be better. But the Kindle’s battery life is beyond good.

Will take a look at some magazine subs tonight. In general books look good, and I plan on giving some use in the next few days when I go to Hawaii.

— Alan

1733

got mine today. am currently using Calibre and a combination of Gutenberg and Munseys.com to fill the thing.

Any other good free book resources in a handy list?

1734

Agree with all your points except that you can actually rotate with the Text key (Aa). (Maybe you meant auto-rotate?)

Edit: Oh and regarding the PDF choke thing, try converting the problem PDFs in Calibre and see how that displays for you. So far I’ve gotten around the issue, but then again my PDFs are mostly light on graphics and tables and stuff like that.

1735

I’ll take a look, thanks!

What I was referring to by “rotate” was the “locked” screen on the Kindle, if that would rotate every once in awhile to a new screen/logo. It’s a very small pet peeve of course.

Though it’d be nice if the display auto-rotated depending on orientation too (I take it the DX does this).

I’m assuming there’s something supposed to be on the display all the time, that is, once you lock it down.

— Alan

1736

There’s a dedicated free eBook thread, but it hasn’t seen much action recently. It’s still a good place to start.

1737

thank you kindly

i’m finding Gutenberg and Munseys to be realllllly hit or miss (mostly miss) with regards to tagging.

1738

The way eink works, it only draws power when it switches state. So leaving it with a static image in place is basically “off”, from a display perspective. Switching the off image around would just cause it to draw power when you’re not using it.

As to the PDFs, honestly, fuck PDFs is my motto. The Kindle can view them, but since they don’t reflow, the text is all teensy, and reading a page by zooming in to sections awkwardly isn’t fun. And Calibre can convert them to MOBI files, but since PDF isn’t designed for that sort of thing, it doesn’t necessarily work well – the one I tried had the page header/footer repeated in the text of every page.

And when you’re talking about “bad scans,” I assume you mean PDFs where the text is actually an image (aka, if you bring it up in Acrobat, you can’t use the text selection tool to select individual letters), in which case, nothing can help you at all with it.

1739

What do you mean by “tagging”? The actual content of the book, or its metadata?

I find Gutenberg content kind of disappointing. Their fixation on ASCII over Unicode, and on plain text over structured document formats, means that their ebooks are often kinda weak. No italics, no curly quotes, no em-dashes, etc.

I wish there was a Gutenberg-style project out there, but with more technical acumen.

1740

meta-data. I haven’t had time to do anything beyond quick glimpses at some books, so I don’t know how difficult / easy it will be to actually read something on the kindle. I’m in the unfortunate place of having something like 10 library books out currently that need to be churned through first